There were Doctors’ bills, medicines and special food to be paid for, and the rent was overdue by several weeks before Stella went back to the theatre again. The only good effect of her illness was that it seemed to make her prettier than she had been before. At times she was almost too buxom. As Chrissie said when she was angry, she looked and behaved like ‘a fat cow’. With her face a little thinner and her waist several inches smaller from enforced starvation Stella appeared more than usually dazzling.

The Rajah thought so, anyway.

To Chrissie it was a miracle that, from having been in dirty, smoky London, hard up and in debt six weeks ago, they should now find themselves in the sunshine at Monte Carlo, living in luxurious surroundings which even exceeded her wildest dreams.

Many people would have found the Villa Mimosa rather vulgar, but to Chrissie it was a veritable fairyland. The softness of the beds, the curtains of silk and brocade, the thick pile of the carpets, the ornate, gaudy decorations were to Chrissie all objects of unparalleled beauty.

Stella liked them too, but then Chrissie had known her like their lodgings in a back room in Manchester or a dingy attic overlooking the docks at Liverpool. She had long ago ceased to pay much attention to Stella’s opinion about anything.

‘He’s crazy about you, that’s certain sure,’ she said now, standing in the window of their sitting room at the Villa Mimosa, her hunched back sharply silhouetted against the blue sky outside.

Stella, lying on the sofa, reading a yellow-backed novel and with a huge box of chocolates at her side, did not answer. Chrissie waited for a moment, then turned towards her.

‘Did you hear what I said?’ she asked.

Stella looked up from her novel reluctantly. As she did so, she reached out her hand for another chocolate – a large one, ornamented with a crystallised violet on the top. She was extremely pretty as she lay there, dressed in a pink satin gown which the Rajah had brought her in Paris. It threw a delicate flush over her white skin and brought into prominence the blue of her eyes. It also accentuated very noticeably the curves of her figure, which seemed to Chrissie to have grown even more pronounced during the last few days at the Villa.

‘Stop eating chocolates and listen to me, Stella. You’ll be getting as fat as a porker if you go on like that. The food here is too rich.’

‘It’s jolly good,’ Stella replied, ‘and I like François.’

‘He talks too much,’ Chrissie snapped more from habit than conviction, for like Stella she had discovered that François, who was Chef at the Villa, was an unfailing source of information about everything and everybody at Monte Carlo.

‘He’s promised to buy me some truffles when he goes into the town today,’ Stella remarked dreamily. ‘I adore truffles.’